Analysis

An Olympics in LA—regardless of how “successfully” it is executed—will be disastrous for Angelenos across the city.

The International Olympics Committee (IOC) is one of the least transparent and most brazenly corrupt institutions in the world. Its goal is to turn a profit at all cost, with little to no care about the cities it invades. A Los Angeles Olympics will be nothing short of a wide-reaching, incalculably destructive media party for millionaires and billionaires. The Olympics puts the interests of the mega-rich and corporate brands above the interests of athletes, fans, and working people in the cities it commandeers. Should LA host the Olympics, we will see wide-ranging human rights violations and the forfeiture of our city to the interests of contractors, developers, media corporations, and the special interests who designed the bid. Preparing for and hosting the Olympics will place unnecessary financial stress on the citizens of LA while also disrupting the lives of the several million people who live and work here. There’s a reason Rome, Boston, Hamburg, Budapest, Krakow, Oslo, and Stockholm abandoned their bids to host the Olympics; they listened to grassroots pressure—i.e. the actual voices in their cities—and ultimately did the right thing.

We categorically oppose the prospect of an LA Olympics, whether they are “successful” or not.

Why even a “good” Olympics will be bad for LA

These are the consequences of a “good” Olympics, where everything goes according to plan, nothing goes over budget, and there are no major ecological disasters or other crises:

1. Construction and displacement

The idea that the LA Olympics will only build “temporary structures” is misleading. While it’s true that Los Angeles doesn’t technically need to construct new permanent buildings and facilities for the Olympics, they do need to make existing buildings and facilities Olympics-ready, which would involve extensive construction and development. These “temporary structures” will be in place beyond the three weeks of the Olympics—they will be open and operable during the Paralympics, as well as the lead-up to the Games.

We do not have any confidence that the individuals in charge of overseeing the development and construction of these sites will take the needs of working Angelenos, including those who are significant risk of displacement into account. Instead, it will most likely be used as a pretext for developers and politicians to advance projects that will increase real estate values and commerce in certain areas, not benefit the current residents. Even when it comes to transit expansion, which has been sold as a major selling point and benefit of hosting the Olympics, the historic record shows that the only transit expansion that occurs satisfies needs during the Olympic Games themselves. We believe that transit expansion should be its own direct initiative, not just a token add-on, and should not come at the expense of current residents’ right to housing.

All of this is especially relevant in light of the affordable housing and homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, which is likely to be exacerbated beyond the Games themselves. In addition to new developments and transit that do not meet the needs of existing residents, we have seen construction and tourism in recent games lead to accelerated gentrification and displacement of existing residents, particularly low-income and immigrant residents. In London, for example, the site of the Olympics Village was Eastham, which at the time was the most racially and ethnically diverse borough of London and whose residents had an average yearly household income under £29k (~$37k). After the Olympics, the Village was converted into a mixed-use site including affordable and market rate units. To qualify for more than half of these units, households needed to demonstrate a minimum of somewhere between £48k and £73k ($62k and $94k)—i.e. between two and three times the typical resident of the area.

2. Commercialization and police crackdowns

Besides the literal construction of spaces to hold Olympic events, crowds, and athletes, the Olympics also puts pressure on the host city to appear clean and unthreatening— and therefore more commercially viable for corporate sponsors. We fear that anyone who doesn’t fit the image of Los Angeles that the Olympics bid committee and stakeholders (i.e., corporations and developers) want to sell to the world—e.g., poor people, immigrants, gender non-conforming people, disabled people, mentally ill people, sex workers—will be at high risk of displacement and police violence. In 1984, the last time Los Angeles hosted the Olympic games, Police Chief Daryl Gates arrested thousands of Angelenos of color suspected (on scant evidence) of being in gangs in “Olympic Gang Sweeps,” denying them due process. This, in turn, led to the creation of fascist, lawless cop “special divisions” like Operation Hammer and C.R.A.S.H. (“Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, responsible for the Rampart scandal). The LAPD is already one of the most militarized police forces in the United States and helped create the idea of police militarization in America — in no small part through its militarization in the ‘84 Games. The National Special Security Event status that comes with the bid (and began in 2024 at Mayor Karen Bass’s request) also requires the collaboration of city, state, and federal policing bodies. In past Games this has included DHS, ICE, CBP, U.S Secret Service, FBI, state police, local police, the Sheriff’s Department, Fire Department, Transit, Airport Police, Department of Defense (DOD), US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) or geographically relevant support, LA28 Private Security, the Coast Guard, National Guard, Reserves, U.S Marshals Service, ATF, EPA, CDC, and the FDA.

In contrast to “failed” or messy Olympics such as the ones in Rio or Sochi, which were plagued by scandals and highlighted failures of politics, public health, and infrastructure in the host city, a “successful” Olympics presents a particularly positive and profitable version of a city to the world. Dissent and criticism of local industry, city officials, corporate sponsors, etc. is not a part of that vision. When criticism threatens profit and patriotism, there is an increased incentive to crack down on all forms of protest, and the increased emphasis on nationalism provides an opportunity to frame those individuals and actions as a threat to national security. We have already seen this with the summer 2025 anti-ICE protests, where Trump has proved more than willing to sic the National Guard and Marines on protesters. To date, the largest number of people who have died in connection to the Olympics was not the result of terrorism or a natural disaster, but law enforcement, when 300 protesters were killed at the 1968 Mexico City games.

3. Exploitation and disenfranchisement

Besides the increased risk of displacement and police violence to marginalized communities, the Olympics also threatens Los Angeles workers. LA has seen a sharp decline in unionized construction projects, and we fear the Olympics might only make this anti-union trend worse. In Rio and Sochi, the games facilitated the exploitation of builders and other temporary workers.

The bid committee’s own economic study admits that job creation as a result of the games will not be long-lasting, noting that “The bulk of these jobs would result from spending in the economy during the Games—suggesting the jobs will be temporary.”

And, of course, the Olympic Games exploits athletes’ labor. American Olympic athletes typically make well below a living wage for their years of work as athletes. An LA Olympics would be an endorsement of this long-held tradition of exploitation of American labor.

The fact that the Olympics is for the benefit of large business interests is shown in the lack of transparency and democratic or collective decision-making in the Olympic bid process itself. Just as the people of Los Angeles had no say in the decision to submit the city for the 2024 bid, we had no say in how the bid was written or how the Games will be executed.

4. Diversion of resources

Los Angeles is facing a number of critical and urgent issues that affect huge swaths of our city’s population, which the IOC, Casey Wasserman, and the bid committee do not even pretend to want to address. We are in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, which is inextricably linked to our city having the highest rate of unhoused/chronically homeless people in the country. We have more people living in poverty than any other major city in America and are ranked seventh in income inequality. LAPD consistently kills the most people out of all US law enforcement agencies. Our city operates the biggest, most expensive, and overcrowded prison system in the country, and our county puts more people on death row than any other. We believe that resolving these crises as quickly and humanely as possible should be our city’s priority, and that for our city’s leaders and elected officials to waste this much money and energy on any other goal is unconscionable.

We believe there is no moral, ethical, or sustainable way for the LA Olympics to take place.

The Olympics won’t just disrupt one community in Los Angeles; this is a violent mass event which directly affects and disrupts all residents of the host city—particularly those who are already at-risk. Those who will be most negatively affected were not consulted and included in the decision to bid for the Games, and we assert that those leading the bid want nothing to do with actually improving our city or the lives of its residents.

We therefore continue to oppose the Olympics coming to Los Angeles. We also stand in solidarity with cities around the world saying ‘No Olympics here, no Olympics anywhere!’

And that’s not mentioning a litany of other problems.

CA and L.A. taxpayers are on the hook when the Games go over budget. Federal taxpayers will dish out $2B in security costs regardless. The Games will displace our already-healthy tourism economy, push out film and TV productions, and lose sales tax revenue (Olympics transactions are tax exempt). And don’t forget the exorbitant ticket prices, plus the waste, water, and other environmental quagmires, human rights abuses, sexual abuse, stress on the transit system, increased traffic, and the potential for ecological nightmares, just to name a few.

References

Case study: The 1984 LA Olympics

The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles are frequently trotted out as a “best case scenario” for a host city—a profitable, efficiently run showcase for American values and national virtue signaling. This is a categorization that we reject and want to challenge on a number of levels.

First, profitability, efficiency, and nationalism are not our goals, and we would never define the success of any program in those terms. We would not define any Olympic Games as successful without demonstrable connection to improving the quality of life and equality in our city. The ‘84 Games did not organize and protect workers, raise the minimum wage, or provide universal access to healthcare and education. They did not end the criminalization of poverty, rampant police violence, or homelessness crisis in our city.

Second, the ‘84 Olympics were followed by one of the greatest periods of injustice and oppression and social unrest in our city’s history, culminating in the 1992 Uprising. On a purely intuitive level, we cannot accept that the ‘84 games as a “success” when they immediately preceded such a difficult and violent period that highlighted institutional failures that persist to this day. We believe that these events are not mutually exclusive, but rather inextricably linked. The 1984 Olympics marked the beginning of a period when complaints of police brutality rose at the same time that the LAPD stopped investigating or prosecuting complaints against officers, essentially creating an incentive for police to “crack down” and use excessive force on certain populations (i.e., poor people and people of color). Simultaneously, the 70,000 jobs that the Olympics claimed to bring to the city disappeared quickly, leaving communities that were already struggling in the wake of the recession with astronomical unemployment rates.